IRVINE, Liz Kiszely, english professor, Fullerton College: Yes, a three-decade stint on
the Supreme Court is too long a term, as argued in Erwin Chemerinsky's guest column, “Limit Supreme Court terms” [Commentary, Aug. 4], but even term limits fail to address the deeper political schism embedded in the Supreme Court rulings on commercial speech that have steadily eroded democratic government.
Chemerinsky offers substantial reasons to support his observation that liberals and conservatives are discovering common ground in their desires to limit the terms of Supreme Court justices: longer life expectancies, equal opportunities for presidents to fill vacancies, a chance to increase judicial responsiveness to current political climates, other ways for retired justices to continue serving in the court system and an absence of life tenure for justices in other major countries.
Chemerinsky also claims, “A person should not exercise that much power for … three decades or longer” That reason broadcasts the void at the heart of this matter – the dismal absence of the court's accountability – not necessarily to the majoritarian process – but to the very citizens, both majorities and minorities, whose exchange of their human rights constitute a government of, for and by all the people.
We no longer have such a government. When a fraction of 1 percent of a population holds all of a country's wealth, the more accurate term is “plutocracy.” Democratic government has morphed into corporate feudalism. In corporate feudalism, the consolidation of private domains poses as much of a threat to free speech as does more traditional government because in transmitting speech along commercial avenues, what the public hears is ranked in accord with special rather than common – and thus the allegedly equal – interests.
Perhaps seduced by its own power to decree laws, the court upheld, in the Citizens United case, an analogy that money equals speech. To be sure, money provides the escort service for power.
My college students are already savvy to this reliable and pervasive corruption of those in power – and many of them do not even make living wages yet. They are, however, deeply disaffected with government.
Why, then, is there such an absence of awareness in the “high” court's interpretation regarding what is self-evident to the commoners over whose lives the speech of said court rules unchecked?
The human right to speech is inherently free. In conflating that freedom with an exchange of goods, services, influence and power in the marketplace the Supreme Court disassociated itself from the vast majority of human beings whose ancestors already agreed to an exchange of individual free speech rights for citizenship in a government that united to protect those freedoms.
But then, particularly when democracy is not anchored in a sense of moral concern for other human beings, even democracy provides no protection against greed, against hubris or against reinventing guises of royalty.
Economist Milton Friedman has argued that a corporation's duty is to maximize profit for shareholders – certainly not to protect the free rights of those without money. Such, he argues, is the province of charities. An individual in a corporation may be charitable, but the corporation “itself” has no responsibility to members of a society, not the least because corporations have no existence other than paper/digitized records. Friedman qualifies his advocacy for making money by saying it should be done within the “rules” and adhering to “ethical custom.” But rules and ethics in today's culture are diverse, and there is ample evidence that at least one “ethical custom” in the white collar world is to “outsmart” that which gets in its way.
The hand of the marketplace feeds those in power. Is it not the duty, then, of the judicial body in a democracy, its Supreme Court, to balance the rights of all members within that society, those with privileged commodities such as land and slaves, or railroads and control of digital spectrums, and those without food and a place to sleep? Neglecting to balance the rights of all citizens, both royal and poor, deepens the divide between Wall Street and Main Street.
It is the court's failure to uphold its moral duty to protect the free-speech rights of all the people in a society who have agreed to abide by its laws that has produced a society increasingly divided into haves and have-nots.
There should be no supreme ruling involving free speech without equal representation of the speech of, for and by all of a society's people – even – or perhaps in particular – those whose speech it is more difficult to mine for a commercial-exchange value.
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